2006 Heinz I. Eulau Award

For the best article published in the American Political Science Review and Perspectives on Politics during the previous calendar year. Two Eulau Awards are made, one for each journal.
 
Award Committee: Claire Jean Kim, Chair, University of California, Irvine; Joseph M. Bessette, Claremont McKenna College; Dennis Chong, Northwestern University; Jonas Pontusson, Russell Sage Foundation; Deborah Stone, Dartmouth College

Recipient: Jennifer L. Hochschild, Harvard University

Title: "Editor's Notes," Perspectives on Politics

Citation: As the first editor of Perspectives on Politics, Jennifer Hochschild fashioned a new genre in her "Editor's Notes" at the same time as she fashioned a new journal for the discipline. Her notes at the beginning of each issue were always a tour de force of intellectual synthesis—and eloquent, fresh writing. She found common themes in seemingly disparate articles, and in her creative juxtapositions, she illuminated each article, enlarging its significance beyond a stand-alone article. Collectively, her notes form a running commentary on the state of the discipline. In her role as editor, Hochschild has educated and inspired the profession.

Recipient: Susan C. Stokes, Yale University

Title: "Perverse Accountability: A Formal Model of Machine Politics with Evidence from Argentina," American Political Science Review, vol. 99, no. 3 (August 2005)

Citation: This year’s Heinz Eulau Award Committee has selected Susan Stokes’ article “Perverse Accountability: A Formal Model of Machine Evidence from Argentina” as the best article published by the APSR in 2005. Stokes’ article is organized around an elegant game-theoretic model of the strategic interaction between party machines and voters that yields several testable hypotheses about the conditions that are most conducive to vote buying and the types of voters who are most likely to be targeted by machines.

The model focuses our attention on the credibility problem that is implicit in but largely neglected by the existing literature on clientelism: How do parties know that voters will honor their part of the bargain when they cast their ballots? Stokes argues persuasively that three conditions give rise to and sustain vote buying: (a) voting technologies that allow party activists to monitor voters in more or less subtle, informal ways; (b) community structures characterized by lack of anonymity; and (c) “tentacle-like” party organizations.  

The hypotheses that Stokes derives from her formal model are tested and largely supported by her analysis of original survey data from Argentina. In exemplary fashion, Stokes’ article combines formal modeling with an empirical analysis that is appropriate to the data at hand, compelling and readily accessible. Collected by the author, the empirical data speak directly to the micro foundations of the formal model.

Stokes’ article breaks new ground not only by placing the question of “perverse accountability” (parties monitoring voters) center stage, but also by shedding light on the question of why “dueling machines” is a rather uncommon phenomenon, why it is often the case that some parties specialize in machine-style politics while others pursue different electoral strategies. The committee is confident that this article will endure as a central reference point in new theorizing and empirical research on machine politics and clientelistic practices. Especially in view of the prevalence of clientelistic practices in new democracies across the developing world, the questions addressed by Stokes are important to political science as a whole.